George Edwin Starbuck was born June 15, 1931 in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Illinois and California. He was twice married and had five children. He served in the Army Military Police Corps in California and Germany, 1952-1954.

Starbuck's education includes: California Institute of Technology, 1947-1949, University of California at Berkeley, 1950-1951, and he earned a B.A. at the University of Chicago in 1957, after which he attended Harvard University for one semester. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship from 1961 to 1962, and was a fellow in residence at the American Academy in Rome (Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters), 1961-1963. Starbuck began publishing his poetry in 1955 in such noteable magazines as Harper's, New Yorker, Yale Review, Paris Review, and North American Review. He authored four books of poetry: Bone Thoughts (1960), White Paper (1966), Elegy in a Country Church (1975), and The Argot Merchant Disaster (1982).

Starbuck was a lecturer in Boston and New York before working in that same capacity at the University of Iowa in 1964. Starbuck's grandfather, Edwin Diller Starbuck, was a faculty member of the University of Iowa's Department of Philosophy from 1906-1930. At Iowa, George Starbuck became Assistant Professor of English in 1966, and Associate professor in 1967. He served as Director of the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop from September 1, 1967 until May 26, 1971, succeeding Paul Engle, who resigned in 1966 in order to direct the International Writing Program at Iowa. Starbuck left Iowa to head the graduate writing program at Boston University, a position he held for twenty years.

George Starbuck developed Parkinson's Disease in 1974, and died at his home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on August 15, 1996.